Strategies and actions towards sustainability: Encouraging good ITS practices in the SUMP vision

Nowadays, cities are increasingly required to be smart, sustainable, resilient and adaptive and, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic, an integrated approach to transport planning needs to be adopted. In fact, European policies have adopted a series of limitations in the transport sector that led the scientific community to put into question the traditional transport planning process, by accelerating processes close to sustainability, started some time ago. In fact, many efforts in terms of strategies, initiatives and research have been made in the last decade to enhance new forms of sustainable urban mobility, in order to reduce the externalities associated with the transport sector. To achieve this goal, the European Commission has emphasized the integrated planning at all mobility levels. Among the other instruments, it has been identified a key role in the writing of the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP), its management and also through Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). Based on this premise, the aim of this paper is to present first results of a wider research aimed at investigating the methodological and practical approaches to boost the strategy of integration between transport systems and urban planning by using ITS technologies and infomobility systems. The research can support further investigations in order to define specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure and monitoring the impacts of technologies on developing smart cities and promoting sustainable mobility approaches, facing the urban planning and transport mobility issues of modern society.